My subject is mentoring Jane Austen and how
Samuel Johnson’s ideas became a distinctive presence in her writings. A mentor, as we know, is a wise advisor, a teacher or a coach.
According to Greek mythology, the character Mentor was the loyal
friend
and advisor to Odysseus and the counsellor to his son Telemachus. He was left in charge of the household when Odysseus went off to
the
Trojan War, and he did much to rouse the young Telemachus to action and
later to
bring peace between Odysseus and the warring Ithacans. As we use the term, such a figure is the inspiration and guide
for many a
bold undertaking – a new job, a course of study, a goal of personal
fulfillment. He is, as we might
say, a role model – constant, reliable, and judicious. I would like to suggest that Samuel Johnson served this purpose
for Jane
Austen, as she modelled many of the portraits of human behaviour to be
found in
her writings upon his steadfast principles. A mentor need not be physically present to affect the course of
his protégée’s
life: in this case, Samuel Johnson was at least two generations removed
from
Jane Austen: he lived from 1709 to 1785, she from 1775 to 1817. They never met, but I believe no one had a greater influence on
her
artistry.

There is no question that Jane
Austen read
intently and deeply admired works by and about Johnson, including the
periodical
essays in the Rambler, Idler, and Adventurer,
the
philosophical tale Rasselas, the Lives of the Poets,
the published
Letters, as well as the famous biographies by Boswell, Mrs. Thrale,
Frances Burney, and Sir John Hawkins. As
her brother and nephew declared in the early nineteenth century, she
considered
Johnson to be her “favourite author in prose” (H. Austen 7;
Austen-Leigh
89), and in her own letters she refers to “my dear Dr. Johnson” and “my
dear Mrs. Piozzi” (the former Mrs. Thrale) to convey more than just a
preference for a chosen writer. It
is rather like a feeling of imagined intimacy, together with the
respect and
affection accorded to someone held in high esteem, shall we say, a
mentor? In this essay I want to explore a leading aspect of Johnson’s
mentoring
Jane Austen, related to the topic of family life. I believe that Johnson’s opinions on marriage and the family had
a
powerful influence on Jane Austen as she came to create the plot and
characterization in her novels, the rich complication and individuality
of her
special domain: “3 or 4 Families in a country village.”

Johnson’s thoughts on family
life were
iconoclastic for the eighteenth century or, for that matter, any time,
by virtue
of their brave unsentimentality and daring realism. He writes of conflict and maladjustment, of cruelty and
oppression. In unmistakably strong terms, he compares the tyranny that may
be
exercised in private households to political disfranchisement, a kind
of violent
subjugation by malignant rule. In Rambler
148, he states:

The regal and parental tyrant differ
only in the
extent of their dominions, and the number of their slaves.The same passions cause the same miseries; except that seldom
any prince,
however despotic, has so far shaken off all awe of the public eye as to
venture
upon those freaks of injustice which are sometimes indulged under the
secrecy of
a private dwelling.Capricious
injunctions, partial decisions, unequal allotments, distributions of
reward not
by merit but by fancy, and punishments regulated not by the degree of
the
offence, but by the humour of the judge, are too frequent where no
power is
known but that of a [parent].(Yale
Works 5:25)

Likewise, in Rasselas,
his characters
investigate the habitual enmity to be found in private life. In a famous discourse, the princess Nekayah explains the growing
disaffection between parents and children:

In
families, where there is or is not poverty, there is commonly discord:
if a
kingdom be, as Imlac tells us, a great family, a family likewise is a
little
kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions.An unpractised observer expects the love of parents and children
to be
constant and equal; but this kindness seldom continues beyond the years
of
infancy; in a short time the children become rivals to their parents.Benefits are allayed by reproaches, and gratitude debased by
envy.
Parents and children seldom
act in concert: each child endeavours to appropriate the esteem or
fondness of
the parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation, betray each
other to
their children; thus some place their confidence in the father, and
some in the
mother, and, by degrees, the house if filled with artifices and feuds ….
Thus parents and children, for the greatest
part, live
on to love less and less: and, if those whom nature has thus closely
united are
the torments of each other, where shall we look for tenderness and
consolation?(Chapter 26 – Oxford Works 376)

Do some of these situations of
rivalry,
faction, and estrangement that Johnson describes in domestic life sound
familiar
as we approach Jane Austen’s writings? Take,
for example, this excerpt from “The Watsons.” In a brief respite from the party of vain, greedy, and heartless
persons
who constitute her social world, Emma Watson, the heroine of one of
Jane
Austen’s fragments of novels left in manuscript, reflects on the
encroaching
horrors about her. A writing of
little over 16,000 words, begun in 1804 and broken off the year after,
“The
Watsons” (so entitled by its first editor) well encapsulates the Austen
heroine’s familiar plight: to be in company but never more alone. Reprieved for the moment from the selfish demands of others,
Emma
considers “the dreadful mortifications of unequal Society, and family
Discord,
… the immediate endurance of Hard-hearted prosperity, low-minded
Conceit, and
wrong-headed folly, engrafted on an untoward Disposition .... She was become of importance to no one, a
burden on those
whose affection she could not expect, an addition in an House, already
overstocked, surrounded by inferior minds with little chance of
domestic
comfort, and little hope of future support” (Minor Works 361-62).
Or witness this passage from Lady Susan,
where the
fiendish mother stews at the upset of her vindictive plot to marry her
only
daughter to a ne’er-do-well:

That horrid girl of mine has been trying to run
away.– I had not a notion of her
being such a little Devil before; she seemed to have all the Vernon Milkiness;
but on receiving the letter in which I declared my intentions about Sir
James,
she actually attempted to elope; at least I cannot otherwise account
for her
doing it.She meant I suppose to go
to the Clarkes in Staffordshire, for she has no other acquaintance.But she shall be punished, she shall have him.(Minor Works 268)

Jane Austen analyzed and wrote
extensively
about characters caught in cruel vises which lock them into dangerously
helpless
positions, vises operating through the dynamics of family life. By contrast to clinging to the idealized or sentimentalized
versions of
human nature popularized by many of her contemporaries, she radically
defies
conventional myths about marriage, sex, the family, friendship, and the
like. She explodes the credence and dogma once taken for granted about
these
complex human relationships, and she does so in a manner thoroughly
advanced for
the time. For Austen, psychodynamic issues
take precedence over the old
moralistic world view, since she observes people as they are,
not as they
ought to be. Owing much to
Johnson’s unstinting realism and sharp analyses of human behaviour, she
draws
pictures of everyday life by finding the hidden motivations, the
interior chains
of causality, that influence us to behave as we do. It is this remarkable development of a psychological realism
that became
Johnson’s chief legacy to his intellectual protégée, Jane Austen. “No man so acutely discerned the reason of every fact, the
motive of
every action, the end of every design” (Johnsonian Miscellanies
1:308),
wrote Mrs. Thrale. Indeed, an
intense and purposeful inwardness pervades the very texture of his
writings. And to Jane Austen, he must have been the guide for her
astonishing
insights and revelations about scenes of domestic discord. If we consider the six major novels, we find organizing themes
which are
eminently Johnsonian, in effect, related to profound unconscious
dynamics and
their powerful influence upon conscious life.

In psychological terms, the
plots and
characterizations of Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride
and
Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion are so
structured
that they lead us to discover the pattern of inward life. As we become more and more immersed in the story, we observe the
heroine’s deeply suppressed unconscious wishes projected upon external
reality, much to her own cost and sorrow. And
in each case these wishes, ever the more compelling by virtue of their
prohibition, are found to be the effect of stifling, distressful family
relationships. It is inherently a burden
of existence that any number of
parental figures – mothers, father, aunts, uncles, guardians – act as
the
official saboteurs of powerful human emotions, and so it is that the
suppression
of rage, sexual desire, envy, and the like, leads to severe conflict
and
misdirection of normal aims and instincts. Generally the problematic family members in Austen’s novels are
at
best, dead (Mr. Henry Dashwood, Mrs. Woodhouse, Mrs. Elliot); at
middlemost, self-centred (Mr. Woodhouse, Aunt Bertram), or remote (Uncle Bertram,
Mr. Bennet);
and at worst, cruel (General Tilney, Aunt Norris, Mr. Elliot). While Catherine
Morland, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet,
Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, or Anne Elliot may secretly resent, even
reject,
the precepts of incompetent parental authorities, she is at the same
time
subject to their arbitrary rule. Moreover,
in the peculiar bargain which has been struck, she becomes the
caretaker of
seriously flawed, rather weak-minded specimens of failure and
unhappiness, as
her nobler spirit is offered up, as it were, to the caprice and
wretchedness it
is her duty to assuage.

Austen’s heroines labour under
continual
agitation and duress, which would shatter less sturdy souls: the
progress of
Catherine’s unhappiness, we are told, is hastened through the languid
insipidity of Mrs. Allen, her chaperone at Bath. When Catherine is reluctant to leave with the boorish John
Thorpe, as she
was earlier engaged to Miss Tilney, she asks the older woman for
advice: “
‘Do just as you please, my dear,’ replied Mrs. Allen, with the most
placid
indifference” (NA 43). Elinor
and Marianne suffer varying degrees of chagrin and remorse for their
mother’s
lack of good judgement and romantic folly, particularly as she pushes
the latter
into the arms of the reprobate Willoughby. While Elinor cautions her sister against increasing involvement
and
indiscretion, “Mrs. Dashwood entered into all their feelings [Marianne
and
Willoughby’s] with a warmth which left her no inclination for checking
this
excessive display of them. To her
it was but the natural consequence of a strong affection in a young and
ardent
mind” (SS 54). Elizabeth
cringes during the famous supper scene at Netherfield, while her mother
rattles
on with mounting gaucherie about the would-be acquisition of Bingley’s
fortune
for Jane (and rather incidentally, Bingley along with it), and her
father sits
amused and detached. The blundering
antics of the rest of the family, compounded by the haughty superiority
and
critical eye of Mr. Darcy, are such that “Elizabeth blushed and blushed
again
with shame and vexation” (P&P 100). Fanny is mortified and abused throughout her young life by the
patently
malignant Aunt Norris, always brandishing her vicious charges and
reminding
everyone of the girl’s humble origins. When
Fanny begs to be excused from the raucous private theatricals at
Mansfield, Aunt
Norris retaliates: “I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful
girl, if
she does not do what her aunt and cousins wish her – very ungrateful
indeed,
considering who and what she is” (MP 147). Emma
ever teeters on the brink of disaster lest her dear
father’s phobic universe be invaded. Even
the welcome company of their own especial set is fraught with
difficulty. Considering Mr. John Knightley’s occasional ill-humour, for
example,
Emma nervously anticipates the dire effects on her father of “a sharp
retort
equally ill bestowed. It did not often
happen; for Mr. John Knightley had really a
great regard for his father-in-law, and generally a strong sense of
what was due
to him; but it was too often for Emma’s charity, especially as there
was all
the pain of apprehension frequently to be endured, though the offence
came
not” (Emma 93). And Anne
trembles at her father’s tyrannical selfishness and callous neglect of
all but
his own empty little affairs. Of
his stony-hearted reaction to her past unsuccessful engagement to
Captain
Wentworth, we are told: “Sir Walter, on being applied to, without
actually
withholding his consent, or saying it should never be, gave it all the
negative
of great astonishment, great coldness, great silence, and a professed
resolution
of doing nothing for his daughter” (P 26).

If the Austen heroine is
systematically
enmeshed and enthralled by a troubled family life, here is also the
origin and
development of internal discord, and thus we discern the
psychologically
deterministic pattern of present difficulties. Unable to satisfy compelling human needs, she expresses
frustration by
any number of evasive manoeuvres: psychosomatic illness, phobic
isolation,
paranoia, and vain and foolish strategies to control others. Moreover, as the chief of her deprivations is sexual, so it is
that she
becomes compromised to varying degrees by an irresponsible, dangerously
erotic
young man – John Thorpe, Willoughby, Wickham, Henry Crawford, Frank
Churchill,
William Elliot. With the likes of
these, any hope of serious attachment can only bode more sorrow and
unhappiness. It seems a desperate dilemma: on the one side, complete, if
short-lived
sexual bliss, followed by the necessary falling off of affections,
infidelity,
betrayal, and eventual abandonment and loss; on the other side,
continued
toleration of increasingly intolerable circumstances. The latter choice, in effect, embodies the Austen heroine’s
celebrated
“self command,” which analytically suggests radical suppression of all
but
overwhelming primary instincts and emotions, a condition inevitably
leading to
serious impairment. In the midst of
these equally bleak and ill-favoured prospects, the hero appears on the
scene,
in a mythic sense, as it were, to redeem what could only come to
intense grief. Henry Tilney, Colonel Brandon, Edward Ferrars, Mr. Darcy, Edmund
Bertram,
Mr. Knightley, and Captain Wentworth reach their respective heroines on
the
deepest level of consciousness as, Perseus-like, they break the chains
that bind
these women to grotesque inner demons. They
provide the loving acceptance and passionate commitment so desperately
craved. We may now turn very briefly to Pride and Prejudice to
see more
concretely how some of these psychological ideas work.

Very much like the other
heroines of Jane
Austen’s novels, Elizabeth Bennet is decidedly vulnerable and isolated. Beset on all sides by a grim host of self-absorbed,
self-indulgent, even
vicious individuals, she often resembles the mythic Cinderella, her own
great
worth neglected or discredited by those who are themselves worthless. Consider her plight early on in the novel.
Deemed “Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me,”
by
the initially supercilious Mr. Darcy and chagrined beyond the limits
that anyone
need endure by Mr. Collins, who reminds her during his proposal, “It is
by no
means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you” (P&P
108), Elizabeth is quite alone in the passage to becoming a woman. The need to feel loved, to feel beautiful, to feel wanted, seems
denied
to her: she is eclipsed by Jane’s better looks and Lydia’s vivacity;
she is
to her mother “the least dear … of all her children,” and to her
father,
the relationship is most peculiar. While
it is true that he prefers her to his other daughters, that very
favouritism
seems less than advantageous. In
their typical fashion of undisguised mutual disparagement, Mr. and Mrs.
Bennet
also manage to disparage their entire family, as she complains, “
‘Lizzy is
not a bit better than the others; and I am sure she is not half so
handsome as
Jane, nor half so good-humoured as Lydia. But
you are always giving her the preference.’ ‘They have none of
them
much to recommend them,’ replied he; ‘they are all silly and ignorant
like
other girls; but Lizzy has something more of quickness than her
sisters’ ” (P&P
4-5). He does welcome
Elizabeth home the two times she was gone, first to Netherfield to
attend the
ailing Jane and then to Hunsford to pay a wedding-visit to Charlotte,
but again
his manner is characteristically oblique, as if to reassure himself,
not his
daughter. And I have often thought
one of the cruelest and most wounding scenes for Elizabeth is near the
end of
the novel, where her father summons her to his room to share the “joke”
of
Darcy’s alleged attraction to her. “Let
me congratulate you, on a very important conquest,” he begins and goes
on to
sport with his daughter’s feelings: “Mr. Darcy, who never looks at any
woman
but to see a blemish, and who probably never looked at you in
his life! It is admirable!” We are told:

Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make
her feelings appear what they were not.It
was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.Her father had most cruelly mortified her, by what he said of
Mr.
Darcy’s indifference, and she could do nothing but wonder at such a
want of
penetration, or fear that perhaps, instead of his seeing too little,
she
might have fancied too much.(P&P
362-64)

It is only with Mr. Darcy’s
ability to
love Elizabeth that he can rescue her from a life grown almost
invariably
wretched. Wickham’s treachery, Lydia’s
disgrace, her mother’s
stupidity, her father’s aloofness – all of these would conspire to
bring her
down were it not for Darcy’s help. “To
receive and communicate assistance, constitutes the happiness of human
life: man
may indeed preserve his existence in solitude, but can enjoy it only in
society” (Adventurer 67 – Yale Works 2:389), wrote
Samuel
Johnson. The social possibilities in Pride
and Prejudice are
indeed bleak, from impaired parental authorities, to their self-deluded
children, but finally to those who provide or learn to provide genuine
loving
support and hope for the future. In
the end, Elizabeth and Darcy are united, and in this triumph, we
celebrate the
richest possibilities for happiness in the modern world. They are joined in mutual regard, loyal co-operation, and the
pleasures of love, very much like the encouraging advice Johnson would
offer in
his special role of mentoring Jane Austen,

Evidently, Johnson’s writings,
along with
Richardson’s novels, were an important inspiration for
nineteenth-century
novelists of manners, of whom Jane Austen was one of the original and
most
brilliant. The genre represents a
significant juncture in the history of
ideas, where people begin to conceive of themselves as psychological
rather than
as exclusively moral beings. Far
from a stern authoritarian dogmatist, Johnson speculates upon and
analyzes
problems of personal identity and human relationship, to help pioneer a
just
then emerging science of human nature. His
interests lie not in moral-punitive ordeals, in the manner of, say,
Pope and
Swift, whose characters suffer protracted physical abuse and vicious
reproach
for the consequence of their so-called “evil” acts. Instead, Johnson’s host of characters – chiefly in the
periodical
essays, in Rasselas, and in the biographies – are as free from
the
stigma of sin and evil as one gets in the eighteenth century. While they are certainly dressed in all fashion of human
frailty, their
real punishment or reward, as the case may be, is just being themselves.

To discover what constitutes the
true self,
Johnson understood the necessity of penetrating beneath the façade of
self-delusion. He often creates
episodes of affectation and masquerade, the very stuff that Jane Austen
and her
fellow novelists of manners took as principal themes. In Adventurer 84, for example, he tells of the follies
of a
stagecoach ride, where boorish passengers vie with one another in
ludicrous
impersonation of ladies and gentlemen of wealth and social position,
and he
analogizes to common experience:

Every man in the journey of life takes the same
advantage of the ignorance of his fellow travellers, disguises himself
in
counterfeited merit, and hears those praises with complacency which his
conscience reproaches him for accepting.Every
man deceives himself while he thinks he is deceiving others.(Yale Works 2:411)

In Rambler 16, he gives an account of
the hack-writer with delusions of grandeur, who believes he is haunted
by
rapacious celebrity seekers:

I live, in consequence of having given too great
proofs of a predominant genius, in the solitude of a hermit, with the
anxiety of
a miser, and the caution of an outlaw; afraid to shew my face lest it
should be
copied; afraid to speak, lest I should injure my character, and to
write lest my
correspondents should publish my letters; always uneasy lest my
servants should
steal my papers for the sake of money, or my friends for that of the
publick.Thus it is to soar above the rest of mankind.(Yale Works 3:91)

And in The Life of Savage, Johnson
writes, with more forbidding consequences, of the poet’s severe
personality
impairment:

By
imputing none of his miseries to himself, he continued to act upon the
same
principles, and to follow the same path, was never made wiser by his
sufferings,
nor preserved by one misfortune from falling into another.He proceeded throughout life to tread the same steps on the same
circle;
always applauding his past conduct, or at least forgetting it, to amuse
himself
with phantoms of happiness, which were dancing before him; and
willingly turned
his eyes from the light of reason, when it would have discovered
illusion, and
shewn him, what he never wished to see, his real state.(74)

Apparently for
Johnson, one of the cruelest effects of self-delusion is isolation and
estrangement from the rest of mankind.The
passengers on the stagecoach are dispersed on their cheerless, separate
ways;
the hack-writer continues mured up in a garret; and Richard Savage dies
forgotten in a Bristol debtor’s prison.Deceiving
oneself brings on failure in human community, as the manipulation of
truth
dangerously severs the bonds of social co-operation and social control:

There is no crime more infamous than the
violation of truth.It is apparent
that men can be social beings no longer than they believe each other.When speech is employed only as the vehicle of falsehood, every
man must
disunite himself from others, inhabit his own cave, and seek prey only
for
himself.(Yale Works 2:62)

Have we not arrived once again at a familiar
situation in Jane Austen’s novels, the ominous crisis originating in
mendacity
and self-oblivion, the prospect of the bleakest of futures? But let us conclude, as she always does, on a more promising
note. In the words of Mr. Knightley, that eminent Johnsonian, and
perhaps the
character who embodies the greatest tribute to “my dear Dr. Johnson,”
we
re-affirm the good faith and probity in human relationships. Ever set to undo the skein of error and adversity that entangles
the
heroine and her friends, Mr. Knightley speaks as Johnson’s purest
disciple:

“Mystery; Finesse – how they pervert the
understanding!My Emma, does not
every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and
sincerity in
all our dealings with each other?”(Emma
446)

WORKS CONSULTED

Austen,
Henry.“Biographical Notice of
the Author” (1818).Included in
the first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.Ed. R. W. Chapman.